Something is wrong with growth, and everyone has a different explanation.
Which problem you have depends on where you are. Before you scale, the job is proving the offering and getting the story right. Once you are scaling, the engine gets built, and then it leaks. Those are different problems on different clocks, and the fix for one is useless against the other.
Start with your stage of growth. It is one question, and it decides which half of this page you should read.
THE PROBLEM
Your growth is carried by a few heroes and a few buyers who "get it."
Neither scales. Neither is in your control. Neither is predictable.
YOUR SELLERS
14%
of sellers generate 80% of new revenue.
A few of your market-facing people carry the message. The rest leave money on the table in every conversation.
EBSTA × PAVILION, 2025 GTM BENCHMARKS
YOUR BUYERS
86%
of B2B purchases stall during the buying process.
A slice of your ICP maps your capabilities to their problems, with conviction, on their own. You'll run out of them.
FORRESTER, STATE OF BUSINESS BUYING, 2024
Most of your people cannot carry the message, and most buyers will not translate it on their own.
First, which of these is you?
Two stages, and they fail differently. Most people know which one they are in the moment it is said out loud.
Pre-scale: the offering is there, the story is not
Early customers are real and some of them love it. But every deal still gets explained from scratch, usually by you. The demo lands, everyone nods, and then nothing moves. And you cannot yet say who this is for in one sentence a stranger repeats back to you correctly.
Two things have to be true before scaling is a plan. Someone has to be willing to pay for the product, and the market has to be able to hear what it is. The first is proven in the market, not in a workshop. The second is the one that is constantly mistaken for the first, and it is where I work.
Scaling: the engine is built, and it leaks
You have go-to-market fit. Buyers recognize the problem when they hear it named, and revenue exists. It is not compounding the way the model said it would, or it is compounding at a cost that keeps climbing.
From the top, a strategy that is wrong and a strategy that is not being executed both produce the same flat number. Telling those apart is the first job, and it is most of the job.
Start here: three ways a scaling engine leaks, and two questions that tell you which one you have.
Still not sure? Pre-scale companies argue about whether anyone wants this. Scaling companies argue about why the thing people already want is not growing faster. That is the line.
You’re probably here because
Each of these leads somewhere different. Pick the one that happened.
- Every deal still gets explained from scratch, and you are the one explaining it.
- You have real customers and still cannot say who this is for in one sentence.
- Buyers ask which budget this comes out of and nobody has a clean answer.
- Your leadership team cannot agree on why growth stalled.
- CAC is rising and payback keeps stretching.
- You are winning in some segments and losing badly in others.
- A senior go-to-market hire is about to be made against a problem nobody has diagnosed.
- You relaunched the messaging and nothing changed in the field.
- Deal sizes are shrinking and you are discounting to win.
- The acquisition is not being cross-sold, because nobody knows how to open the conversation.
- Meetings are not becoming opportunities.
- The training program you ran last year has faded.
- The forecast missed twice, and the second time nobody saw it coming.
- A top rep left, and the way you sell went with them.
- A product-led motion has reached the point where retention and expansion need CSMs, relationships and a conversation.
The four problems, and the stage each one belongs to
Three of them belong to a company that is scaling, and they happen in this order. One belongs to the stage before that. A company can have more than one of the three; almost nobody has all of them at once.
Cost
Return on your Go-To-Market Investment
Do we have the right strategy, and is the plan focused and achievable?
Return on go-to-market investment. Not cost reduction: return on cost already committed.
What this sounds like
- Every function has data that supports its own view of growth. Nobody has the whole picture.
- Our investor model, our marketing programs, and our territories describe three different companies.
The metric that usually gives it away: win rate in targeted versus non-targeted segments. If you cannot produce that split, it is a direction problem.
Revenue
GTM Strategy That Survives Market Interaction
Is the strategy showing up in the buyer's own words, or only in our decks?
The gap between the plan that was approved and the revenue the market actually returns.
What this sounds like
- We have a strategy and a positioning deck; what the field says in the room is something else.
- We built real differentiation that never gets negotiated into the buyer's decision criteria.
The metric that usually gives it away: the percentage of deals with a buyer-confirmed differentiated required capability. If that number is unknown, differentiation is not reaching decision time.
Risk
Predictable Growth, Not Heroic Growth
Are the right behaviors embedded in your GTM culture?
Forecast risk in the near term, key-person and transferability risk over time.
What this sounds like
- A handful of people carry the number and we cannot explain what the rest do differently.
- We have trained before; two quarters later you cannot tell that it happened.
The metric that usually gives it away: the dispersion between your top quartile and your median rep. A wide, stable spread is heroics, not a system.
Two questions, and you will know which one you have
These are the two questions I use in a first conversation to keep the first three from blurring into each other. They resolve to exactly one page.
Question 1
Does your leadership team agree on who you are for and what problem you solve?
If you cannot answer question 2 because nobody has listened to a first meeting recently, that is itself the answer. It takes three calls.
If you are pre-scale: one problem, and it comes before the other three
This one runs on a different clock. The product is right and the market has not caught up to it yet. Solve it and the three above become your problems. Skip it and none of them are the reason growth is stuck.
Runway
The Offering Is Ready for Prime Time. The Story Isn't.
Is the offering ready, but not the story?
Every month the light bulb stays off is burn against a finite runway.
What this sounds like
- Everyone in the demo nods, and then nothing moves.
- We keep explaining the offering. They keep asking what it replaces.
What is not on this list
These four are everything I can move in a growth engine. They are not everything that can be wrong with a company. Product-market fit, pricing architecture, raw demand-generation volume and capital structure sit outside them. If that is what you have, I will say so in the first conversation rather than the third.
Most executives can describe their growth strategy in about two minutes. Very few can tell me what their sellers actually say in a first meeting.
I am curious how close those two things are where you are.
Start a conversationGet Started
I will tell you which of these problems I think you have, and whether I am the right person for it.